For Sides, landscape is a dynamic character, with perhaps more power over life and death than any other force in Blood and Thunder. The Southwest is famous for its rugged, picturesque beauty, and Sides uses poetic descriptions of the landscape to foreshadow the events in a scene. As the Navajo chief Narbona waits in trepidation for his first meeting with white men, Sides describes Navajo country as wilting at their arrival: “The brilliant yellow blooms of the chamisa had faded to a drab brown and the aspens were losing their leaves” (189).

When John Washington’s men left Fort Marcy for a dangerous expedition into the Jemez Mountains, Sides emphasizes the local storms: “Summer’s lightning storms nearly always came from that direction; in the afternoons the clouds would build and blacken on the Jemez […] as they snarled east toward Santa Fe […]” (270). He uses a soldier’s own words as Kearny and his men slog through Devil’s Turnpike, a deadly section of desert: “The high black peaks, the deep dark ravines, and the unearthly looking cacti which stuck out from the rocks like the ears of Mephistopheles—all favored the idea that we were now treading on the verge of the regions below” (203).